Down to Earth

By Brian Lavery

Do you remember Australia's '70s? The Vietnam War and the Cold War, the politics, the flower people, the music, the hopes?

 

That Member of Parliament who led marches against war, wrote liberation books he struggled to sell, helped bring down a Government? Who gave the hungry press a feast of scandals? Remember those naked full-moon festivals with all the Minister's happy hippie mates?

 

Well, this old hippie was there, and those mates were his mates, all living their stories. But it was so long ago—the version here probably isn't what happened. He insists it is.

 

The remembering? Yes, it's the remembering that becomes the problem. Some history never becomes history. No-one finally remembers what happened. No-one recorded it.

 

So, this is that record. Before the remembering stops, because it's already near half a century ago.

 

A hippie rambling. Almost the missing diary.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Lavery
• Release date: Feb 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648846635

Brian Lavery

Brian Lavery is one of Britain's leading naval historians and a prolific author. A Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and a renowned expert on the sailing navy and the Royal Navy, in 2007 he won the prestigious Desmond Wettern Maritime Media Award. His naval writing was further honoured in 2008 with the Society of Nautical Research's Anderson Medal. His recent titles include Ship (2006), Royal Tars (2010), Conquest of the Ocean (2013), In Which They Served (2008), Churchill's Navy (2006), and the Sunday Times bestseller Empire of the Seas (2010).

Book preview

Spoiler:

It’s not really a history book.

It’s an earthly love story.

One that starts on another planet,

and arrives here thinking to fix this one.

Revolution

I WALKED UP THE STEPS of the ageing Parliament House, brilliant white in the Canberra winter sunshine. Parapets, bays and balconies, neoclassical, clean. But this grand seat of Government was listed for replacement.

Only Leon was here yet, wearing his farm boots and beret.

We waited. Today was quiet, as Parliament wasn’t sitting. There were guards, but guards in 1976 just looked. In the large lobby hung framed portraits of every Australian Prime Minister since Federation.

The others straggled in, including three from Leon’s commune. Plenty of jeans and colours, but not a tie among us.

Cairns’s parliamentary assistant, Junie Morosi, arrived to gather us and lead us through the maze to Caucus Room 2.

And so twelve people seated themselves at a formal meeting table covered with dead microphones and live jugs of water. MP Jim Cairns with cool passion laid out his subversive dream of a people’s revolution.

– Intermission –

YOU REMEMBER AUSTRALIA’S ’70s? The Vietnam War and the Cold War, the politics, the flower people, the music, the hopes?

Do you remember that Member of Parliament who led marches against war, wrote liberation books he struggled to sell, helped bring down a Government? Who gave the hungry press a feast of scandals? Remember those naked festivals with all the Minister’s happy hippie mates?

Well, this old hippie was there, and those mates were his mates, all with their stories. But it was so long ago—the version here probably isn’t what happened. He insists it is.

The remembering? Yes, it’s the remembering that becomes the problem. Some history never becomes history. No-one finally remembers what happened. No-one recorded it.

So, this is that record. Before the remembering stops, because it’s already a piece of a century ago.

A hippie rambling. Almost the missing diary.

Brian – Melbourne

1970

The stack of this week’s Melbourne University rag Farrago sat untidily high at the entrance to the Student Union. I picked out a copy and headed down to the Cafeteria instead. No-one I knew was around this evening. Settling to a spaghetti bolognese, the default cheap meal, I ate, waited and idly read, all three together.

Why You Must Act. More undergraduate posture-play politics? What was it this time? No, this headline was Jim Cairns, no less. The Morals of the Moratorium. Campus life was a time to expand who I was, to explore new fields.

I was learning to look at strangers who might smile or talk. After I came home a few years ago, that terrified me, and it had to change. Several years older—and always trying to catch up.

My younger sister was already on campus, so I was effortlessly slotted into a pre-made social scene. It worked.

After last night with Rose, my body still buzzed. Rose, my skinny-limbed anxious friend, with the long reddish dark hair and the green eyes. It was Catholic girl Rose who had broken me in, tightened the bridle on this jerking and terrified brumby until I learned to hear the whispers, accept the handling, and agree to an unexpected new rapport.

Same woman claimed she never farts. Makes no sense, I told her.

I had finished the bowlful when Rose arrived. Hi, sweetie. All done?

Oh, Brian, I’m so tired. Yes, I’m done for today. That was Biology Prac, and it’s always heavy going.

That’s two of us. Go get something to eat, and I’ll drive you home. Tonight is spag bol special night.

Pasta bolognese! It reminded me of the monastery meals in Lent. No, that couldn’t be right; we ate no meat at all in Lent. Hmm, a cosy past life, but a life of negatives, impaired vision. Non-negotiables that make the puzzle unsolvable. I had needed so hard to belong there.

I was desperate now to explore, prise life open. To relearn the social arts. Test beliefs. Defy the superego. Question. The book of life was getting a rewrite, because the first edition was full of untruths.

You’re done too? Rose was trying to ask, looking at me, puzzled.

Oh, yes, I punched up the last of those Fortran cards for this week.

Rose went, and returned with her spaghetti bowl, and with two skinny fingers through two cups of tea.

Now, what’s the tired bit? I asked. You’re not sleeping again?

I’m not. I’m so uncomfortable at home I go most of the night all uptight, and not sleeping, and then the tiredness makes me so anxious and irritable. I don’t know what to do.

Your Mum?

Of course it’s my bloody mother. I fight with her all the time. But it’s not a clean finished argument, ever. It’s just sniping and criticising. I can’t do anything right. I’m dragging them down into disgrace, she says.

You mean I am?

I’m big enough to make my own decisions, but Mum will never think that. She and Father have a whole pattern ahead they need me to stick to. I failed some of last year, and they think it’s your fault because you take up my time. They wanted me to study medicine. I’ll never do medicine, I’m not that bright. I know that, so I am doing what I chose for myself. They feel humiliated.

Rose and I had considered marrying. It would be satisfying to have someone to go home with every night. Parent issues would be solved in one go, both sides. Money and study would be easier. But we were not talking about that anymore. She was younger, and it was all too hard. Hard? Different hards. She would spill her conflicted thoughts. I would say little, and she saw it as some serenity and strength.

Gerri breezed into the Caf, and we dropped our discussion. Some issues were mine and Rose’s.

Hey Brian. Hi Rose. Seen the broadsheet?

Hello Gerri, you mean this one? I pointed to the Farrago supplement, still unread.

Yes. Tomorrow’s Moratorium rally. Are you joining us? After yesterday’s Kent State massacre, the Vietnam War is even more wrong.

Little Gerri was in jeans and a white top that curved tightly around her. I flicked my eyes away. She saw.

I DIDN’T TAKE THE MINI to the city. I caught the train from Footscray, and the trains were packed. The newspaper posters outside Flinders Street Station read panic. "Police Helmets Against Peace. SitDown ShutDown". I headed to the Treasury Gardens and lost myself in the rump of a huge crowd. It was still early. I wasn’t joining anyone. I had decided only this morning I would come.

I hadn’t been demonstrating before. Placards were important. "Aussie Boys Aren’t Yankee Toys. Stop Viet War Now. We Want Out". Most banners bore an affiliation, to a union or lobby group. I was just me.

Gerri I couldn’t find anywhere.

At three the speaker ahead crackled into life. Parliamentarian Jim Cairns addressed the crowd. "We are here in peace. Let us keep it a day of harmony. Our aim is to bring about the immediate withdrawal of the Australian Forces in Vietnam. The war is wrong, it’s immoral. We are the people, and they will hear us.

"We will march together down Bourke Street, and there we’ll pause. We will sit there for fifteen minutes. Australia will hear us. We will parade back up Collins Street, and again we will sit in the city. All this with calm and deliberation.

Follow the directions of the marshals and walk calmly. Let’s return here after we have sent our message in the streets of the city.

We walked, Jim Cairns at the front, and the mass poured out into Bourke Street. There were no trams, no traffic, almost no other pedestrian movement. The police had secured that portion of the city. Melbourne was at a standstill. Melbourne was watching with total anxiety.

We occupied half the length of Bourke Street when we sat. A lone helicopter rattled overhead, and the voice of Jim Cairns boomed out again from the back of the support truck.

Australia, we are the people. The war is wrong. Bring our soldiers home.

This was history. I’d never seen history happening before, and no-one had been shot yet.

The masses shuffled around to Collins Street and Cairns repeated the people’s statement. It was well after five when the last of the marchers merged back into Treasury Gardens.

They have called us crazy radicals. They have labelled me ‘Ho-Chi-Jim’. They have called you deluded and dangerous. My friends, we have stared them down. Was our march today risky? Yes, today had potential for great and senseless violence. We have occupied the city to speak our message of peace. We are a hundred thousand strong here today. Nobody thought we could do this. This is a big day for freedom and for our country.

A FEW YEARS EARLIER

I laid out the religious habit on the bed of my cell, folded the items neatly. None of my Brothers knew, only the Brother Superior. That was the way it was done. The others were all in Chapel now.

Two days ago I had been escorted on a short shopping expedition to buy a shirt, a cardigan and some civilian trousers. That’s what I now wore. I carried nothing else than a prayer book and a difficult diary.

Along the crunchy white stoned driveway, I walked out through the front gate. The border transfer. I dropped one book by the gate.

My parents were waiting in a car. No-one spoke, beyond a quiet Hello.

I MADE THE BACK GARDEN my cloister, and paced that. Suggestions arrived that getting a shop assistant job might be useful. It would help in talking with other people.

After a couple of months, I stirred myself to get a clerk’s position in the city assisting a government design team of microwave tower engineers.

Currency changed from pounds to dollars.

One of the typists introduced me to yoghurt, and I hated it.

A dance school was nearby, so I enrolled for a class; after the six weeks I did not renew.

My bosses said they liked my work, and I admired the graphic plots and the equations they played with.

Rose – Canberra

1971 AUTUMN

Brian and I move to Canberra soon after he graduates, taking good honours. Canberra has good and stable employment for engineers, and it is still enticing interstate immigrants with rental relief. We rent first a rendered home in old Narrabundah, but move ourselves shortly after into a newer brick veneer house in Curtin.

Canberra isn’t Melbourne—it has no history. It's a new start. Both of us. No minders. No reminders. No black bits, so we can paint our own colours.

I gave up my laboratory job at St Vincent’s Hospital, and up here I have now found something matching at the Medical Research School at the Australian National University.

Could I make a new academic start here? Melbourne University threw me out. If I apply again to study at ANU, will all that be still counted against me?

Brian – Canberra

WITHOUT HER KNOWLEDGE, I lodged an appeal to the Science Faculty. Granted an appearance, I appealed for her on the grounds of past parental discords, depression and financial stresses, all factors that, approximately, we hoped no longer applied. They accepted my petition, and allowed Rose to study, conditional on a clean future record.

As I expected, she was both furious and grateful. I took it with head bowed and with hands protecting my ears. I loved her.

We determined to secure our position in our adopted city. Canberra has no ownership of housing land—it is all assigned on ninety-nine-year lease. This was the only capital in the country where the bureaucrats who drew up the town plans had control over the developers.

So how much did a land lease cost? About the same as freehold land would cost. They used to sell the leases, releasing them in monthly lots, but under new arrangements all new land was now being auctioned. Costs for a block were rising dramatically, now routinely well into four figures, and it was a frightening burden for an aspiring house-owner to take on.

We were not financially ready yet to pay out for land and a builder, and we were watching in alarm as the prices rose faster than we could match. Auctions required cash, and banks demanded a substantial cash deposit for a house mortgage.

Brian, I’ve been looking at the rural section. Do you think we could handle living out of town?

Out in the country? We’ve barely arrived here, and you’re thinking of leaving? What have you found?

Well, she said, there are houses in Bungendore for ten and twelve thousand. We went through Bungendore when we went down to the coast some months ago. Can you remember how far from here Bungendore was?

It was forty kilometres to Bungendore, out across the border, through Queanbeyan, and along the Kings Highway, still on the tablelands. Past Bungendore, the highway continued another hundred steep kilometres down to Canberra’s seaside playground of Batemans Bay and beyond.

Bungendore was a sleepy country town, first settled in the 1840s, and complete with those memories that old country townships have, old post office, court, churches, wide dusty streets and several pubs. The railway station was on the line from Goulburn that went down through Queanbeyan, Bredbo and Cooma. Gold had been discovered nearby, and gold money leaves its echoes in towns. Bungendore had even once been a candidate for Australia’s capital, a contest won by Canberra.

It was a weatherboard house we looked at, a shack on a quarter acre. The street was unsealed—they all were—and was three blocks back from the highway and the minimal town centre. The asking price was twelve thousand dollars. We couldn’t raise that. But the search had started.

I called to the auctions office in the city each month to get the list of Canberra house blocks for auction, and we drove to Macgregor and Latham to look over the pegged sites. Then in the auction room we cringed at the aggressive bidding that pushed prices higher each time.

Rose’s colleague Rachael invited us one weekend for lunch at the Captains Flat cottage where she lived. Rachael and boyfriend Wal were in the last house in the Flat, past streets of fibro-asbestos houses, many unoccupied. Many blocks were vacant as those buildings had been transported away as holiday shacks elsewhere.

Their place was in a gully on the left at the town outskirts on the Jerangle Road south. Trees and shrubs grew across the house, covering it almost completely. Captains Flat was a derelict mining village, but this house was a pioneer cottage pre-dating the mine days. As we waited for friends of Wal who were to join us, we walked and inspected the little old gem. This was rural with a quaint brutal character.

So where does your property reach to? Rose asked. I loved her.

To the base of that cliff. The plans show we go to that forlorn old hedge. Some distance beyond that was the Molonglo River.

Nobody else is along here. Perhaps you could get hold of the rest of the strip to the water? I suggested.

We don’t care. There’s no-one there. We did put the question to Council a while ago, and they said they’d prefer not to know. If we moved our fence-line ourselves, and there isn’t a fence anyway, then they were unconcerned. But what’s the point, we can walk to the river, and we don’t want to do anything special with the extra land. It’s just a bit of Aussie dirt.

What’s upstream behind the cliff? asked Rose.

The Molonglo has a dam up there. The mining company built it, and we have unlimited clean piped water. The whole Flat has.

We wandered inside. Two rooms, one older than the other, and attached outhouses. They were renovating the ceiling in one room using refurbished flooring boards.

We love it here, and we can afford it. It cost us fifteen hundred dollars outright last year.

I wondered if the commuting costs were under what they saved. Probably. But the tiny house owned an atmosphere that money could never duplicate—exquisite feral.

Wal’s friends arrived, Miri and Joan. They lived on an old farmhouse halfway between here and Queanbeyan. The six of us settled in to enjoy some Flat hospitality.

AN EARLY SUMMER

It’s Time! thundered Whitlam, the wannabe Prime Minister.

Rose’s father had been a working man, always voting Labor. Rose had never voted anything else, but Labor had been out of office for more than twenty years. The old conservative Government was losing its stranglehold on the average voter, and the Labor camp were convinced a turn at power could be theirs this time.

Labor had new policies on Aboriginals, on women, on incoming migration. It was the new issues that were raising the public excitement, not the perennial economy, which was prospering comfortably. The young and those in newer social movements were thinking Labor by default.

Labor wanted to wrap up the last vestiges of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Shadow Minister Jim Cairns lost no opportunity to remind all that it had always been Labor who had stood against the war, and the conscription of young Australians that sustained it.

In the election build-up, Rose started going in two evenings a week to Parliament House to join the pre-election work team. She wanted to do her part in a campaign she believed was important. She would make friends, too.

She would come home tired and excited, after talking, stapling, stamping, preparing lists of addresses, debating options, listening to try-outs of policy wordings, and phoning colleagues and faithful all across the country. She found it all heady stuff. This was the nerve centre of a critical struggle, a turning point for the nation.

It was the same year a new women’s movement was unfolding, the Women’s Electoral Lobby, WEL. Many of the women on the Labor campaign team quickly identified with the new force. Rose would head out to a Labor event and return from WEL.

Dave – Captains Flat

MID-SUMMER

His Mum was still furious. Dave had brought the bus home unannounced two weeks ago, and had parked it at the side of the family house in Weston, a new area of Canberra. Where else could it go? Where do you store a full-sized Sydney passenger vehicle?

The single-decker nine-ton bus was a 1953 Leyland Tiger, from the Commonwealth Engineering workshops in Sydney. It still wore its blue fleet colours, and still had its cloth destination rolls in those little windows front and rear. ‘Elizabeth Bay’ and ‘155’. It would be a party trick to crank the handles and set a new destination. There was a small peephole from inside, but it took a good outside look to confirm the sign had accurately rolled to the placename you wanted.

It had read ‘Broadway’ when Dave picked up his new toy on the Central Coast. He had received little instruction on how to control the beast. The trip home—highway, mid-city and hills—was an exercise in learning fast, avoiding knocking anyone else, and owning some road bravado.

His route on that first day was across the Harbour Bridge and right through Sydney, and several folk waiting at traffic light corners had sought to board. He had to wave away the would-be commuters.

Over the fortnight, Dave had replaced the 24-volt battery bank, as the old ones were no longer starting the big motor easily. He wanted the vehicle ready for Sunbury.

He had lifted the engine covers, which were a monstrous saddle inside the bus and beside the driver. The ten litres of motor was one straight-six diesel steel monster with minimal fittings. Too primitive to look at, basic but huge. When it started, it idled along with its slow metallic deep thunder throb, an unmistakable threat of untamed crude power if asked.

He liked his gadgets, but this was too awe-inspiring and too ancient. He was scared to touch, adjust or tighten anything, at least yet. He had checked it had oil, and replaced the covers.

Johnny, the seller, had owned it only five months. He wanted cash. From Johnny, only a few more items of guidance were forthcoming. The large screwed panel in the wooden floor at the centre of the bus was over the gearbox—that gearbox was huge, should never be touched, and was going to be big trouble if it ever had problems. Don’t rev the motor too fast, and the red line on the tachometer indicator was, well, it was the red line. One last caution, when you start the motor, let it idle for several minutes until the air pressure for the brakes comes up past this line.

What had he bought?

The bus seats were gone, but fitting out as a house-bus was barely started. Behind the driver, Johnny had built a raised platform that served as storage and as a generous bed, good for two people, and more if a need arose.

Johnny had fitted a black plastic water tank to the bus roof. Water piping led to a shower fitting inside behind the rear door. In the floor was a drain tray, and a drain-hole dropped the shower water to the ground. It was a crude job.

Dave was under no illusion. It would be a lot of work to turn this stillborn house-bus creature into a beautiful child of the 1970s. But he was the man. Carpentry and fitting out was not going to be a problem.

After Sunbury.

AROUND THE BACK DOORWELL, Dave had lashed sleeping gear and food and some chairs. He wore his black trousers and black shirt. He started the motor, and his Mum stood at the house steps, hands on hips, frowning.

Clambering back out over the engine bay, he walked around the bus and looked at the compressed gas tank underneath. Dirt and compressor oil clung to the fittings. That might need some attention before long. But not today. The pressure gauge was there alongside the tank, oily like the other parts. It took some while for the pressure to rise, but Dave had once before been through the fright of slow under-performing brakes. That was on a test run, and he hadn’t heeded Johnny’s warning, hadn’t taken the care to get the air ready.

The motor was noisy, but he could still hear his Mum’s thoughts as she glared at him. Mum had seen her own man walk away years ago. Her first son Barry she was still proud of, but she had lost him to the Vietnam War. In Dave, though, she saw only sorrow and trouble, and it made him resentful. He held a graduate clerk job on the Art Gallery team, even though they hadn’t completed the new Gallery building yet. She should be satisfied.

The bus thundered out of Weston and made its way up the Hindmarsh Hill. The red line of the tachometer matched fifty miles an hour on the speedometer. So was it a danger to the motor to be going faster? He needed to talk to a diesel person.

It was easy enough to hold the bus at eighty (in the new measurement) on level road—and downhill too, braking each time it raced away. But this vehicle was able to do the same speed uphill. The diesel worked